Sample Sources
The sources below are those contained in our three curated collections—covering themes of Passover, Gender Roles, and Holocaust Resistance. They represent a fraction of the thousands of sources that will be available when the full site launches in 2024.
The Grandmother and Her Granddaughter
A big room divided in two by screens. One half represents a bedroom where Odele reclines sadly on a sofa. The other half represents Bontsye’s room: on a table lie a taytsh-khumesh [the Tsene…
Wedding Riddle
This wedding riddle from Italy is written in Hebrew and Judeo-Italian. Wedding songs, sometimes performed by professional jesters, were traditional at Jewish weddings. Some had lyrics in the form of…
A Jewish Tailor
A Jewish Tailor is one of Mark Antokolski’s earliest sculptures, created while he was still a student at the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts. The work appeared in an era of liberalization of tsarist…
Hasidism Encounters Reform and Produces Anarchism
The chief hypocrite of Russia who sold his soul and his ideas to the Hasidim for the price of 2,000 shekels wrote the following: “If any man says, I am a Jew in accordance with the law of Moses (Mende…
A Confession Regarding the Jewish Question
So, after all, we have arrived again in a situation where we must confess. We younger ones had felt entitled to the hope that we would gradually succeed in living integrated into the “nation of Kant”…
Atheistic Theology
Jewish thought, having always been in a vital relation to Christian scholarship—sometimes, as in scholasticism, the influencing part, sometimes, as in the 19th century, the influenced part—has…
On Matters of the Hour
Now I want to talk about the approach to the Arab question. When I was discussing Brit Shalom [Covenant of Peace], I asked: Can there be a common position of Zionists and non-Zionists on this question…
Soviet Russia as I Saw It
[ . . . ] We have heard so much about the achievements of the Evsektsiia [Jewish sections of the Communist Party] in the field of Jewish culture that for this alone many…
Our Renaissance
Ladies and gentlemen!
We can say that time has passed and pens have dried up. Misery is our destiny and the West utilizes it as a tool to ensure our silence. The West manages and shapes our destiny as…
Rosh Hashanah Sermon for the Jewish Father
Assimilation in our day has spoiled and distorted the essence of our festivals. It has turned Rosh Hashanah into a day of festivity filled with the sound of music and song. However, the first day of…
Sephardi, Not Oriental
I have noticed the change of the word “Oriental” to “Sephardi” in the masthead of the latest issue of the journal [La Amerika], “Organ of the Judeo-Sephardi (and no longer Oriental) Colony of America…
One Literature in Two Languages
Some impassioned readers among us will not admit that our one and only literature has a double language. After the Czernowitz conference, one of our Hebrew writers (now living in America) swore…